Japanese magazines specifically for girls, known as shōjo magazines, first appeared in 1903 with the founding of Shōjo kai(少女界?, Girls' World), and continued with others such as Shōjo Sekai(少女世界?, Girls' World) (1906) and the long-running Shōjo no tomo(少女の友?, Girls' Friend) (1908).[4][5]

Simple, single-page manga began to appear in these magazines by 1910, and by the 1930s more sophisticated humor-strips had become an essential feature of most girls' magazines. The most popular manga, Katsuji Matsumoto's Kurukuru Kurumi-chan (くるくるクルミちゃん), debuted on the pages of Shōjo no tomo (少女の友) in 1938.[6] As World War II progressed, however, "comics, perhaps regarded as frivolous, began to disappear".[7]

Until the mid-1960s, males vastly outnumbered the handful of females (for example: Toshiko Ueda, Hideko Mizuno, Masako Watanabe, and Miyako Maki) amongst the artists working on shōjo manga. Many, such as Tetsuya Chiba,[9] functioned as rookies, waiting for an opportunity to move over to shōnen (少年 "boys'") manga. Chiba asked his wife about girls' feelings for research for his manga. At this time, conventional job-opportunities for females did not include becoming a manga artist.[10] Adapting Tezuka's dynamic style to shōjo manga (which had always been domestic in nature) proved challenging. According to Thorn:

While some chose to simply create longer humor-strips, others turned to popular girls' novels of the day as a model for melodramatic shōjo manga. These manga featured sweet, innocent pre-teen heroines, torn from the safety of family and tossed from one perilous circumstance to another, until finally rescued (usually by a kind, handsome young man) and re-united with their families.[11]

These early shōjo manga almost invariably had pre-adolescent girls as both heroines and readers. Unless they used a fantastic setting (as in Princess Knight) or a backdrop of a distant time or place, romantic love for the heroine remained essentially taboo. But the average age of the readership rose, and its interests changed. In the mid-1960s one of the few female artists in the field, Yoshiko Nishitani, began to draw stories featuring contemporary Japanese teenagers in love. This signaled a dramatic transformation of the genre.[12][13] Between 1950 and 1969, increasingly large audiences for manga emerged in Japan with the solidification of its two main marketing genres, shōnen manga aimed at boys and shōjo manga aimed at girls.[1][14]

From 1975 to 2009[update] shōjo manga continued to develop stylistically while simultaneously branching out into different but overlapping subgenres.[17]Yukari Fujimoto feels that during the 1990s, shoujo manga became concerned with self-fulfillment. She feels the Gulf War influenced the development of "girls who fight to protect the destiny of a community", such as Red River, Basara, Magic Knight Rayearth, and Sailor Moon. She feels that the shoujo manga of the 1990s showed emotional bonds between women were stronger than bonds between a man and a woman.[18] Major sub-genres include romance, science fiction, fantasy, magical girls, yaoi, and "Ladies Comics" (in Japanese, redisu レディース, redikomi レディコミ, and josei 女性).[19][20]

As shōjo literally means "girl" in Japanese, the equivalent of the western usage will generally include the medium[clarification needed]: girls' manga (少女漫画 shōjo manga), or anime for girls (少女向けアニメshōjo-muke anime). The parallel terms shōnen, seinen, and josei also occur in the categorisation of manga and anime, with similar qualification. Though the terminology originates with the Japanese publishers, cultural differences with the West mean that labelling in English tends to vary wildly, with the types often confused and mis-applied.

Western fans classify a wide variety of titles as shōjo, even though their Japanese creators label them differently. Anything non-offensive and featuring female characters may classify as shōjo manga; including the shōnen comedy Azumanga Daioh.[21] Similarly, as romance has become a common element of many shōjo works, any title with romance, such as the shōnenLove Hina[22] or the seinenOh My Goddess! tend to get mislabeled. This confusion also extends beyond the fan community; articles aimed at the mainstream also widely misrepresent the terms. In an introduction to anime and manga, Jon Courtenay Grimwood writes: "'Maison Ikkoku' comes from Rumiko Takahashi, one of the best-known of all 'shôjo' writers. Imagine a very Japanese equivalent of 'Sweet Valley High' or 'Melrose Place'. It has Takahashi's usual and highly successful mix of teenagers and romance, with darker clouds of adolescence hovering."[23]

Takahashi is a famous shōnen manga artist, but Maison Ikkoku, one of her few seinen titles and serialised in Big Comic Spirits, is aimed at males in their 20s. Matt Thorn, who has made a career out of studying girls' comics, attempts to clarify the matter by explaining that "shôjo manga are manga published in shôjo magazines (as defined by their publishers)".[3] However, English publishers and stores have problems retailing shōjo titles, including its spelling. Licensees such as Dark Horse Comics have misidentified several of the seinen titles, and in particular manga and anime aimed at a younger audience in Japan is often considered[by whom?] "inappropriate" for minors in the US.[24] In this way licensees often either voluntarily censor titles or re-market them towards an older audience. In the less conservative European markets, content that might be heavily edited or cut in an English-language release often remains in French, German and other translated editions.

As one effect of these variations, US companies have moved to use the borrowed words that have gained name-value in fan communities, but to separate them from the Japanese meaning. In their shōjo manga range, publisher VIZ Media attempt a re-appropriation of the term, providing the definition:

shô·jo (sho'jo) n.1. Manga appealing to both female and male readers. 2. Exciting stories with true-to-life characters and the thrill of exotic locales. 3. Connecting the heart and mind through real human relationships.

The desire to disassociate the word shōjo from its meaning, "girl", seems[original research?] largely driven by fear of putting off potential new readers, particularly male ones.

Manga and anime labeled as "shōjo" need not interest only young girls, and some titles gain a following outside the traditional audience. For instance, Frederik L. Schodt identifies Banana Fish by Akimi Yoshida as:

...one of the few girls' manga a red-blooded Japanese male adult could admit to reading without blushing. Yoshida, while adhering to the conventions of girls' comics in her emphasis on gay male love, made this possible by eschewing flowers and bug eyes in favor of tight bold strokes, action scenes, and speed lines.

Such successful "crossover" titles remain the exception rather than the rule, however: the archetypal shōjo manga magazine Hana to Yume has a 95% female readership, with a majority aged 17 or under.[26] The popularity of romantic shōjo manga in America has encouraged Harlequin to release manga-styled romanticcomics.[27]

In a strict sense, shōjo manga refers to a story serialized in a shōjo manga magazine (a magazine marketed to girls and young women). The list below contains past and current Japanese shōjo manga magazines, grouped according to their publishers. Such magazines can appear on a variety of schedules, including bi-weekly (Margaret, Hana to Yume, Shōjo Comic), monthly (Ribon, Bessatsu Margaret, Bessatsu Friend, LaLa), bi-monthly (Deluxe Margaret, LaLa DX, The Dessert), and quarterly (Cookie BOX, Unpoko). Weekly shōjo magazines, common in the 1960s and 1970s, had disappeared by the early 1980s.[citation needed]